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Vixen: Here, missy, is what I did. I made the Alchymist my lover. An easy task. For all his occult learning, the old chymist is untutored in love. 

Vixen: His youth and on into the prime of his manhood — year after lonely year of it — he lived friendless, in the crumbling library of a fallen city. Self-taught … confused in his philosophy. Self-loathed … suffocated by obscurity. There followed a brief, glorious time during his maturity, when a king consulted the Alchymist, made him a minister, when pupils trained with him, when ordinary people feared him. That time is gone. Now in old age he is returned to solitude. He pursued the Great Work alone. Or did, until I appeared at the door.

Vixen: Don’t condemn me. Don’t say my efforts were all trickery. Ours was an excellent collaboration. He enjoyed my form and benefited by my fox wisdom. I gained access to his laboratory and his books. We came nearer the Great Work than either one of us might have done without the other. So near!

 

Fox Wisdom (as recorded by William Blake): “Man has no body distinct from his Soul for that calld Body is a portion of Soul discernd by the five Senses, the chief inlets of Soul in this age.”

 

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Clever’s Road 11: GB0061